U.S. Faces New Era of AI-Driven Conflict with China

The character of warfare isfundamentally changing, and the U.S. military’s ability to deter adversaries hinges on its willingness to embrace AI with unprecedented speed and risk tolerance, top national security officials said.

“Our AI tools [can] achieve decision superiority: to be able to see, understand, decide, act, to be able to sense these threats ahead of time, to thwart them and to potentially impose costs and to ensure that our adversaries know that the cost of aggression far outweighs any benefit of aggression is our first responsibility,” U.S. Indo-Pacific Commander Adm. Samuel Paparo said at the Reagan National Defense Forum over the weekend in California. “AI is going to be the nonlinear tool that’s going to be able to enable us as a country to do that.”

Future conflict will be defined by data and the efficiency of AI and autonomy, Paparo added. While the United States retains a distinct advantage in innovation and high-end technology, the War Department faces an adversary in Beijing that operates without the constraints of democratic bureaucracy or ethical guardrails, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael added.

“The Chinese … when they make something a national priority, they can dictate top down. That could cause a lot of action,” Michael said.

The White House released its new national security strategy last week, highlighting that emerging technology like AI is critical to national security.

“We want to remain the world’s most scientifically and technologically advanced and innovative country and to build on these strengths. And we want to protect our intellectual property from foreign theft. America’s pioneering spirit is a key pillar of our continued economic dominance and military superiority; it must be preserved,” the strategy reads.

The Changing Character of Warfare

Paparo framed the adoption of AI not merely as an upgrade to existing systems, but as a response to deep, structural changes in how wars are fought. He described a battlespace radically altered by the convergence of information operations, ubiquitous sensors and lethal autonomy.

“The nature of warfare never changes, which is the continuation of policy by other means,” Paparo said. “But from the standpoint of the changing character of warfare, there are three metatrends and one megatrend that are actively affecting the character of warfare.”

Paparo identified these metatrends as the power of information and cyber operations to affect political outcomes; the “commoditization of drone warfare,” which favors defense by making territorial assault prohibitively costly; and the rise of precise, penetrating strikes. However, he emphasized that these trends are all subordinate to a larger force: AI.

“The [AI] megatrend that surrounds this is the ubiquity, the use, the quality of data, of compute, of algorithms that put those to best use and human employment of those at the tactical level,” Paparo said.

AI processes the chaotic flood of battlefield data faster than a human adversary, allowing U.S. forces to “see, understand, decide and act” with superior speed, Paparo added. This “decision superiority,” he said, is the overarching factor that will determine the victor in a modern conflict involving swarming drones and mass data analytics.

The Adversary ‘Has No Rules’

Michael said that China remains the top competitor in the global AI race, despite the current U.S. leadership advantage. He said that American industry — specifically the “four premier companies” driving AI research — remains the envy of the world, but he warned that China’s state-directed economy allows it to mobilize resources and bypass obstacles in ways the U.S. struggles to match.

“They could connect their data sets together in ways that we can’t do as fast,” Michael said. “They’re going to be developing their own indigenous chipsets with Huawei. And hopefully that doesn’t catch up too quickly to the latest NVIDIA chips, but they have a lot more people to put on the AI research problem. “

The disparity is most acute in the realm of cyber warfare and the infiltration of digital systems, he added, where Beijing uses increasingly aggressive tactics and AI/ML systems.

“The adversary has no rules on this. None,” Michael stated emphatically. “It’s almost cost free for them to do what they did … using agents to sort of infiltrate the model.”

Rewiring the War Department

Michael, reflecting the aggressive reform agenda of the Trump administration, spoke of a cultural and procedural revolution underway within the Pentagon. He emphasized that leadership is pushing for a complete transformation to reintegrate the commercial sector’s speed into national defense.

“We are at the very beginning of a full transformation of the department, and it’s going to take years for us to push it all the way through culturally,” Michael said. “The will is there at the top.”

He noted that the department has launched reforms to acquire requirements faster and is leaning heavily on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies. This shift is driven by the recognition that the commercial sector has eclipsed the military in driving innovation — a reality that Adm. Paparo welcomed rather than lamented.

“It’s not that our military research has fallen behind, it’s that the engine of American innovation has taken off such that commercial innovation has surpassed that,” Paparo said

Echoing Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent emphasis on reform, Paparo said that this shift requires a fundamental change in how military leaders view risk. He argued that the greatest danger lies not in legal liabilities or bureaucratic missteps, but in failing to provide warfighters with the tools they need to survive and win. He called for a recalibration of the legal-versus-physical risk calculus.

“We’re going to have to take a little bit more legal risk to reduce our physical risk, because that’s the space that we’re into,” Paparo said. “Your troops will take way more physical risk than you’re comfortable with, and your troops will take way less legal risk than you’re comfortable with.”

The Era of Drone Dominance

The practical application of these theories was most visible in the discussion of autonomous systems. The panelists touched on the legacy of the Replicator program — an initiative to field thousands of autonomous systems — which Paparo confirmed is “very much alive” and now organized under an “autonomous warfighting group.”

The goal is to create a “denial defense” that makes any assault on the first island chain in the Pacific prohibitively expensive for China, Paparo said. By saturating the environment with unmanned systems, the U.S. can disrupt an adversary’s plans without necessarily committing large numbers of human troops to the initial attrition, he said.

“Don’t send a human being to do something that a machine can do for you,” Paparo said, summarizing the new philosophy of autonomy. “Don’t lose human agency over the offensive operations. The more defensive you are, the more you should rely on machines in order to parry blows.”

Michael said that the Pentagon has formally launched a “drone dominance initiative” to address the spectrum of unmanned threats, from the small quadcopters seen on the frontlines of Ukraine to larger, long-range systems.

“We have embarked on a drone dominance initiative at Department of War that the secretary just announced,” Michael said.

The Pentagon needs to merge its commercial AI prowess with military application to counter China, Michael said. The Pentagon and the services must move at the speed of software and warfare, not the speed of bureaucracy.

“We are moving out and fast on this, thankfully due to leadership’s impetus on this,” Michael said. “It is that moment again to re-industrialize these things, and AI is going to be a big part of that. I’m proud of what we’ve done so far, and excited about where we’re going.”